![]() ![]() Wrestling becomes the family’s pitiless onscreen love language. As David Shoemaker wrote in his book Squared Circle: Life, Death and Professional Wrestling, Fritz “would try over the rest of his life to script reality to suit his fantasy.” After David Von Erich dies, Fritz gathers the brothers on the porch of the ranch before the funeral and launches into a speech about how David was scheduled to win the world championship and now one of them-one of the grieving, devastated brothers-must take David’s spot and win the world championship in his stead. In The Iron Claw, Holt McCallany plays Fritz like a mix of The Great Santini and Mommie Dearest. After the game he gathered his buddies to cavort at the center circle in their never-seen-a-stirrup cowboy boots and triumphantly vape.Īt the event horizon of brutal Texas dads stands Fritz Von Erich. ![]() I’ve coached soccer “against” the dad on the other sideline who barked “No let up!” from behind his reflective aviators as his team of 5-year-olds ran up the score on our team of 5-year-olds. I’ve seen unhinged fathers fume silently at their 5-year-olds’ timid performance and yell at 16-year-old referees. Think youth football arguments that turn fatal. Think high school sports coverage pitched at the intensity of war reporting. I’ve lived in Dallas for six years so I speak from experience when I say that Dallas-Fort Worth is the Champagne region of deranged sports dads. The most niche Montessori, Waldorf, We-Are-The-World private school will celebrate their state soccer title in the smallest private school division like Argentina celebrating the World Cup. Multiple high school football stadiums in Dallas-Fort Worth dwarf Division 1 football stadiums. No other state infuses athletic competition-any sport, any venue, any stakes-with as much existential power as Texas does. Of course the Black and the Mexican and the Native histories in North Texas are all conveniently elided in these tropes, but if you drive through a town in nearby Tarrant Country named White Settlement, you may begin to understand why. Even in the secular, pluralistic, post-internet 2020s, it’s easy to feel the pastiche of images there: dinner bell and Sunday best and working boots and Sir and Ma'am and the Baptist Church and the Methodist Church. The local hippies and artists and readers and burnouts have safe harbor at the local state university. In theright bars you might be greeted with a How do. The county seat, Denton, is quintessential Texas: a sleepy town square with the courthouse right in the middle. The ranch was located in Denton County, a place that was once farms and lakes built by the Army Corps of Engineers. The Von Erich family ranch plays that role in The Iron Claw. Beyond you, fields of clover and sorghum stretch over what was once called the Blackland Prairie. You can still get an outstanding plate of fried green tomatoes from a diner where George Jones and Patsy Cline play on a loop. Even today if you drive north from Dallas in a little over an hour you can gaze at the calves and Clydesdales on working family farms. North Texas proper, around 15 counties and about eight million people, begins just south of the Red River that separates Oklahoma and Texas. But what happens when pain and safety switch venues? The urban-rural, sin-salvation binary speaks to all things Texas. The film divides its narrative between the openness of the Von Erich family ranch in North Texas and the literal smoke-filled rooms of the Sportatorium in Dallas proper. The Iron Claw is also an ineffably North Texas movie. And, really, when we talk about the Sportatorium and wrestling in Dallas, we’re really discussing one set of ghosts: the Von Erich family, and one of the saddest stories in professional wrestling. All the suffering and entertainment and vitality has been rubbed out by Dallas’s smiling, relentless progress and left to go to literal seed. A place where champions like Ric Flair and Harley Race defended their titles and where the men who would become Stone Cold Steve Austin and Mankind paid dues, where the same crusty hotdogs rolled for year after year on corroded old metal, where a mercilessly hard ring broiled in the Texas summer and went frigid with prairie wind in the winter.ĭemolished in 2003, what was the Sportatorium is now a patch of grass beside a knot of I-35 and I-30 highway exchanges in South Dallas. ![]() It was one of the first territories to use character-specific entrance music for wrestlers. Sportatorium truths and apocrypha still drift through wrestling culture. The Whisky a Go Go of 1980’s professional wrestling, Dallas’s crucible of scripted violence and shirtless melodrama, where fans full of this-is-real-to-me fervor once climbed down from the wooden bleachers to start fights with the wrestlers, is gone now.
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